Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Varenka was in love with him too – she often called him ‘my life’ and worried, like all his women, about his illnesses while basking in his luxury: ‘Father, my life, thank you so much for the present and the letter…I’m kissing you a million times in my mind.’ However, she began to suffer and make trouble. ‘It’s useless caressing me,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’m telling you seriously now…if you loved me once, I ask you to forget me for ever, I’ve decided to leave you. I wish you to be loved by another…though no one will love you as I’ve loved you…’. Was this minx of the Engelhardt sisters jealous of another woman, for there were indeed others, or simply pretending to be?

‘Varenka, you are a fool and an ungrateful rascal,’ Potemkin wrote, perhaps at that moment. ‘Can I say – Varenka feels bad and Grishenka feels nothing? When I come, I’ll tear your ears off for it!’ Was it when he arrived in a temper after this that she told him: ‘Good my friend, then if it is me who has angered you, then go!’ But then she said she had slept too much and perhaps that was why she was in a bad mood. So Varenka sulked and postured while Potemkin suffered the tortures of every older man who falls in love with a spoilt girl. The Empress, who invited Varvara to everything and knew of their relationship, did not mind when Potemkin was happy. Indeed she did everything she could to make sure that the niece was close to both of them. When one of the courtiers moved out of the palace, Potemkin asked the Empress to ‘order Madame Maltiz [Mistress of the Empress’s maids-of-honour] to give Princess Ekaterina’s apartments to my Varvara Vasilievna’. Catherine replied: ‘I’ll order it…’.⁷

News of the scandalous affair reached Daria Potemkina in Moscow. The Prince’s appalled mother tried to stop it. A furious Serenissimus tossed her unread letters into the fireplace. Daria also wrote to Varvara to reprimand her. ‘I’ve received grandmother’s letters,’ Varvara told Potemkin, ‘which made me very angry. Was this the reason for you going?’ Then the girl offered herself again: ‘My darling little méchant, my angel, don’t you want me, my adored treasure?’

When Potemkin started to spend more time in his southern provinces, Varvara sulked at Court. Catherine decided to intervene. Harris got wind of this: ‘Her Majesty reproached Prince XXX with the irregularity of his conduct with his niece and the dishonour it brought…’. Harris was projecting English priggishness on to a relationship he did not understand. Catherine’s indulgent teasing of Potemkin about his niece–mistress revealed their open relationship: ‘Listen, my little Varenka is not well at all; it’s your departure that is the cause. It’s very wrong of you. It will kill her and I am getting very fond of her. They want to bleed her.’⁸

Was Varenka wasting away out of love for her uncle? Or was there another reason? The wily girl may have been playing a double game with the Prince. At the beginning, love pervaded her letters to him. Later, their tone changed. Potemkin was still in love with her – but he knew she would soon have to marry: ‘Your victory over me is strong and eternal. If you love me, I’m happy, if you know how I love, you would never wish for anything else.’ Now she was a woman, she did wish for more. She had already met Prince Sergei Fyodorovich Golitsyn, another of that populous and powerful family, and had fallen in love with him.

We do not know if Potemkin was heartbroken for long, but he had resolved that the girls should make magnificent marriages, settling fortunes on them to ease the way. The end of the affair was required by family duty. ‘Now all is finished,’ she wrote to him. ‘I waited for it every moment for a month when I began to notice your changes towards me. What have I done now when I’m so unhappy? I’m returning all your letters to you.’ So it was a two-way street. ‘If I behaved badly,’ she wrote, ‘you have to remember who was the cause of it.’

Potemkin behaved generously. In September 1778, ‘he prevailed on a Prince XXX to marry her’. Prince XXX – Sergei Golitsyn – agreed. ‘They were betrothed with great pomp at the Palace the day before yesterday,’ observed Harris. In January 1779 as with all the Engelhardt marriages, the Empress was present when Varvara married. Varvara and Potemkin remained close for the rest of his life, and she continued to write him affectionate, flirtatious letters: ‘I’m kissing your hands and asking you to remember me, father. I don’t know why but it seems to me that you forget me…’, and then, like everyone else who knew him, she wrote: ‘Come, my friend, as soon as possible, it’s so dull without you.’ She still signed herself ‘Grishenkin’s pussycat’.⁹